It sounds crazy to consider, but maybe they’d rather not try to speed up the individual cores in M1 Max, so that they can keep their overhead competitively low. That certainly would simplify manufacturing and QA; removing an entire vector (clock speed) from the binning process makes pipelines and platforms easier to maintain.
Also, a core is not necessarily just limited by power. There are often other considerations like pipeline length that affect final target clocks.
The fact is that at 3.2GHz, the M1 is very close to a 5800X in single-core performance. When that 5800X cranks up 8 cores, it dramatically slows down the clocks. Meanwhile the M1 should keep its max clockspeeds without any issue.
We know this because you can keep the 8 core M1 at max clocks for TEN MINUTES on passive cooling in the Macbook air (you can keep max clocks indefinitely if you apply a little thermal pad on the inside of the case).
Not that dramatic, it drops from ~4.8ghz to ~4.4ghz: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16214/amd-zen-3-ryzen-deep-di...
Actual drop varying depending on actual power consumption & temperature as Ryzen is more or less an entirely reactive system.
Is that an actual product differentiation from TSMC? Or just observational + the fact that it's 5nm.
I'm actually curious from a chip manufacturing standpoint.
https://www.techdesignforums.com/blog/2021/06/03/three-libra...
I remember seeing a picture of a partner list for a TSMC node with a couple dozen libraries that not only changed based on density, but also on type of chip being built.
https://www.macrumors.com/2021/10/21/new-macbook-pros-high-p...
Is there a guide on how to apply this thermal pad?
I would love for my Air to not downclock.
Also why on earth does this thermal pad not come factory installed?
Realistically, those aren’t typical workloads for most people, especially for 10+ minutes (and especially on an ultralight and portable laptop). So I wouldn’t lose sleep over thermal pads.